I will make less than $99 from the "Buy Tobold a coffee" donation button this year, if I extrapolate year-to-date donations. Thus I do need to think about what happens if every game company follows CCP's move to charge game sites with any income which use their intellectual property $99 a year. By covering so many different games, I would be pretty much screwed if all these companies came and wanted money from me.

Fortunately I am not really at risk. Whatever you think about the originality of my blog posts, they *are* "original" in a legal sense of the word. My thoughts and opinions about various games are my intellectual property, not that of the companies that made the games. I do not need a license to write about a game, or even to describe it. However this isn't a carte blanche for all game blogs: Many blogs I know use screenshots to illustrate their adventures, and those screenshots are the intellectual property of the game company. Theorycrafting sites using lots of data from the game would also be at risk. That can move a blog into the grey territory where legally they would be required to pay a commercial license, but practically it is unlikely that any game company bothers to send you a cease and desist letter for that.

The kind of game sites that are really targeted by that are those that offer third-party services: Databases in which you can look up information about the game, Wikis, and especially sites that offer any sort of addons, macros, or programs. Even if these addons are not banned by any terms of service, as soon as the site is making any money from donations, advertising, or from asking users for money, they would have to pay the $99 license fee.

And it is this fixed amount for the license fee which makes me think that this is an extremely bad idea. If all game companies introduced similar rules, what would happen? Well, the really commercial sites like Curse or Zam would pay up, because $99 per year is probably not a significant deterrent for them. But as there are only a handful of big sites like this, the game company will at best make a couple of thousand dollars, not even enough to pay for monitoring compliance with the license terms. All the small "fan sites" which already work for peanuts, mostly out of love for their games, would go out of business. The game companies would lose huge amount of goodwill from the fans, in exchange for insignificant amounts of money. That can't be a good deal!
- posted by Tobold Stoutfoot @ 8:13 AM Permanent Link
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We will just host the sites in Eastern Europe, Russia or China, or any other part of the world that does not give a damn about copyright laws(lots of them) and use CDN to push content to users. Good luck to CCP there.

I do not think, that this is going to work that way. CCP is still modifying the project and the final rules are not ready yet.Also - before this developers could not legally earn a thing from their work, and having that license they can legally charge a subscription for their services and sell their apps via appstores.A hundred bucks a year is in fact 8 bucks and 33 cents a month. Where I live it's the cost of a not-so-good book or half the cost of a music CD or a dinner at a cheap restaurant. If paying that allows me to legally sell a EVE Ship Fitting app via an appstore, I'm in. People will buy this and I am sure I'll get my 8 bucks back.

Up until this change all EVE apps using the EVE API were non-commercial, and so should be all the websites. And if the profit of a website is less then 99$ a year, the devs there will just have take down the ads and can continue to operate unbothered under the free license.

Thanks to this guys that create EVE apps (a evemail client, a shit fitting tool or character skill planner) can put some extra features in and sell it in an app store.

On a more serious note... I think Bezier's comments are right on the money. CCP are actively pushing this as an opportunity for fans to make money off of their hobby. Not such a bad deal.

Also, note that fansites are already apparently expected to sign a license agreement. I wouldn't be surprised if all companies have similar provisions to this in their license agreements. Like many others pointed out, it really comes down to enforcement. The CCP announcement certainly mentions "donation" buttons, but the context clearly indicates that they are targeting a much narrower group than "anyone with a donation button and a screenshot of a Titan".

So, yes. The text in the announcement was drafted by lawyers. It's not flexible and not particularly fun to read. But it looks harmless.

quote4) Nothing is set in stone. We're willing to reconsider anything you deem unfair about the program. Donation and ad supported ventures is a tricky thing to allow without any sort of a commercial license though and that's a legal slippery slope. Whether that license needs to be $99 per year is something we might reconsider.unquote

As I said, the original message was clearly written by lawyers. I imagine it went something like this: CCP thought it would be cool to finally allow fans to make real bucks off of the service they provide to the community. CCP goes to lawyers to discuss. Lawyers come back and say (a) you need to charge *something* just to make it a "real" agreement and (b) it'll be impossible to define "non-commercial use" in any reasonable way other than by simply stopping at "no income". That's the slippery slope right there: allowing some sorts of income or basing "permissible income from the site" on the type of content provided would simply cause pain (at least in the lawyers' minds – they are the ones who'd have to come up with a legal definition...)

So up the text went. Next up: CCP explains that it'll be perfectly fine for Stargrace to keep writing about EVE on his blog. Then, when the new system goes live nobody will read the fine print, but it will be unchanged. :)

I'd be the writer of MmoQuests, and a she, not a he, but in any case - like I said in my post, I understand that this decision by CCP won't affect me directly, they're not going to bother with a small time blogger - but they will bother with EVEmon, Battleclinic, and numerous other 3rd party apps that I use every single day who take donations for their work. I don't agree with their decision to require payment from those developers who accept donations (be it ISK or real life money) and if that's how they want to play then I simply won't write about them at all any more. Sure, in the grand scheme of things my stance on this matter is going to barely register, but it's a personal matter to me. If an app is REQUIRING a fee then I can see a reason to license them for $99 - but donations and all of those developers who work for free? Asking them to pay yearly out of their own pocket is just not ok.

Nils, your metaphor fails as, depending on your political opinion, you can either say:After they had given control up, they lost.or:If they gave control up, they would lose.Both statements have one thing in common - it was the control of information flow that helped to keep them in power.

Of course, the game companies will still lack control over the information (compared to the communist parties before the events of 1980s) even if they start requiring licenses.

Many apologies for stereotyping you as a man. I am one, and (it seems) woefully predisposed towards that particular kind of prejudice.

Also, I didn't mean to imply that I thought you thought it would affect you in any concrete way. It's just that I fully expect CCP to clarify, sometime soon, that they never intended this as a means of cracking down on Tobold's unused "buy me coffee" button or your "Donate" one. This way, they will seek to defuse the objections against them. Their lawyers will still tell them that it's syntactically impossible to draw the line anywhere other than at the top of their slippery slope, though. So it wouldn't surprise me if the restriction remains on implementation though.

At the end of the day, if they back out of it in this way and people accept it, they will have pretty much devised exactly that which couldn't be devised.

I completely agree with you, Oscar. This whole thing is non-issue. CCP tried to introduce some $99 for the really big sites that make considerable money with Eve.

And CCP being CCP they wanted to discuss it with the players before they introduced it. The predicted outcry happened, even Tobold gives them a bit publicity and CCP will now calm their players and move on.

Nils, would you be as serene if the exact same move had been done by a different game company, like EA, SOE or Blizzard? I think such licensing plans have to be judged neutrally, without regard which company exactly is proposing it.

This is exactly why I split up my posts about this in two halves, one reporting the facts on the CCP plans, the other regarding the issue as if every company did that.

If you had to remove the donate button, would you really care? Like you said, it brings in more or less nothing. Are you REALLY going to get up in arms and quit something you enjoy to make a stand over less than $100 a year?

On the other hand, if you were making thousands a year, but technically it was not legal, won't you feel pretty damn good to have it made legal for just $99 a year?

All the poor "little guys" here who have to remove their $5 donation buttons will be fine, as will blogs collecting pennies from adsense. Those who actually have something worthwhile will finally be able to actually, legal, make some money, potentially even enough to go 'full time' and really make something amazing.

Also, you can't just ask "What if ever company did it", because this would be a very different conversation if Bobby had just announced something similar. Somehow, I doubt he would be focused on the actual app devs. Well, short of putting their realID on the net anyway. Seven years of pushing tech forward, free expansions, and stuff like the player council, or sparkle ponies and paying extra to not get hacked? Which company would you have more faith in to do something like this 'right'?

With all due respect, I think you guys are framing the conversation around the wrong thing.

EVE isn't doing this so that they can make more money. By all accounts, they're flush with cash and whatever pittance they could make with $99/year app fees is negligible.

What they're doing is giving the folks in their community a way to make some money. And, incentivizing people to do so. That's a brilliant move. As great as EVE's markerplace of apps is, it's still pretty limited (one real skill tracking tool - EVEMon, one real fitting tool - EFT, and so on). Giving people the ability to generate revenue will bring more developers into their ecosystem.

The $99/year fee then isn't a money-making scheme. It's a way to control entry into their market. It's a necessary evil, as it requires some commitment (a pretty minor one, to be frank) to be part of the app ecosystem. It works wonders for Apple. I'm surprised more bloggers don't draw that connection ($99/year is exactly what Apple charges, too).

Sigh, I give up. The usual EVE fanbois again make any intelligent discussion impossible. You even admit that it would have been different if Bobby Kotick had announced this, but can't get past the usual apologist arguments just because it's CCP.

I still think the quote from the EVE-O forums somebody posted on the other thread is more relevant here: "You are charging the people who work for free to make your game better you asshat!"

As mentioned, screenshots accompanied by commentary are almost certainly fair use. Also, the sort of things that theorycrafters get into are largely math and formulas, which are not copyrightable. Unless they use quotes of CCP documents, there isn't any copyrightable material to be protected.

Frankly, I don't think that CCP could enforce any of the policies they are claiming.

Intelligent conversation requires you to read and understand what I and others have written. Continually trying to half-read things, responding to something that was not stated, and then resorting to common forum troll tactics is not the way to go about it.

"You even admit that it would have been different if Bobby Kotick had announced this"

Did I?

"because this would be a very different conversation if Bobby had just announced something similar"

Did you read that last word. Similar? It does not mean "the same".

There is a snowballs chance in hell Bobbies VERSION of something like this would sound like the CCP release. If Blizzard today announced you can now sell WoW mods if you just hand Blizz three sparkle ponies, I'd be in favor of that, as finally the people who actually created the WoW UI would get some recognition/reward (albeit way, way too late). We both know that's never going to happen though.

But again, if what you are really after is intelligent conversation, read what is actually written, and respond to that, not what you think or pretend was written.

My take is that this is driven by IOS ( iphones, ipads, iouches) and to a lesser extent (due to itunes store being more mature, not dissing your phone) Android.

1) How do you let developers sell a $0.99 or free-with-ads or even $14.99 app in the iTunes store.

Before this policy, one could not. Now one can. Which is a win for the developers. And I suspect one could not write an ap to read/reformat the Blizzard web sites/armory since Blizzard is selling an ap.

2) Blogs and commentary are free speech/fair use and are uninvolved.

3) Sites without advertising but using content (say a site listing the EVE ships with pictures.) Free license so just slight hassle.

4b) The only people caught in a crack is a developer/content-containing site that has a adsense/donate button generating "coffee cup" income a year.

This conforms with my two beliefs about CCP:

1) they are an innovative company

2) they have horrible PR skills and clueless about marketing. They took an impressive industry first (3rd party developers can sell EVE iphone apps for $99 a year) and generated a firestorm. We used to say that if DEC sold sushi they would market it as "dead, uncooked fish" Perhaps this explains my frustration, that such an innovative game and company is tragically and fatally flawed by choosing sociopaths as their target market.

This is a lot of hot air about nothing. Screenshots in reviews and discussions about game strategy are completely unaffected. As people have pointed out they would be protected by fair use defences if CCP or anyone else tried to stop people using them. And CCP are nbot trying to do that! If you read their posts on their dev blog, you will see what it applies to:

Tobold: I still think the quote from the EVE-O forums somebody posted on the other thread is more relevant here: "You are charging the people who work for free to make your game better you asshat!"

Apple charges its developers to make its platform better. iOS would be nowhere as good as it is today without its app developers, and yet I don't really hear any complaints from its devs. Hell, it's taken my $99 as well, and I'm not complaining. Perhaps $99 may be a bit too much for a company that has a much smaller market, but I don't see much wrong with it.

Tobold: You even admit that it would have been different if Bobby Kotick had announced this, but can't get past the usual apologist arguments just because it's CCP.

To a lot of gamers, Kotick is the embodiment of Satan in the gaming world. I don't know why you even bring up such biased examples. Why not bring up examples that gamers are rather neutral about?

And to be honest, as a person who doesn't care one way or another about CCP, I think the license fee is perfectly fine, assuming they enforce it fairly. I'm not sure why you find it so incredulous to believe that some people might be ok with this.

Finally, for the most part, I kinda think that it doesn't even matter anyways except for the most commercial of products. If you choose to ignore the license fee altogether:

1) CCP is in Iceland. Unless you're planning to make a trip to Iceland, they're not going to sue you, or even they do, it doesn't matter because you can practically ignore it with little to no penalties (I highly doubt they're going to have an extradition order be sent out).

2) It'd cost them more in goodwill and money just to sue you than it would be to ignore you.

Could you clarify what those last things mean? I thought Image Export meant taking screenshots and stuff, but if that's not the case, then again, who cares about this license agreement if it doesn't even the majority of developers?

At first, I sorta assumed that this was the case in the first place, but everyone started to get huffy and mad. I mean, even Tobold got pretty steamed even though none of the terms even remotely affected him in the slightest (even ignoring fair use laws)! Sounds like a whole lot about nothing.

This kind of thing reminds me of a stunt Palm (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palm,_Inc.) now a part of HP pulled back in the late 90s.

Back then there was this war or sorts between palm devices and windows CE handhelds. (of course blackberry ruined this party bu that's another story)

Anyway Palm one day got the brilliant idea to SUE anyone with "palm" in their name or domain name to "defend" their brand or extort a fee. Problem was there was one site where most palm device users got their apps from a site called Palmgear.com. [think 90s version of AppStore]... long story short app sales were impacted by this legal issue and less apps were created for Palm. And a new device type the email blackberry became prominent. Thus Palm devices were impacted indirectly by this "brilliant" Palm move.

Sorry Gevlon you are wrong...again these stunts didn't work for Palm they won't work for CCP.

History has shown that companies ( Wang, Osborne, Palm, Sun, Apollo, Bay Networks etc ) who discourage interaction by usually beneficial 3rd parties are DOOMED to see their competitive position weakened.

I still think the quote from the EVE-O forums somebody posted on the other thread is more relevant here: "You are charging the people who work for free to make your game better you asshat!"

Dear Tobold,

If these people work for free, they are not charged. Non-commercial products have a free license. If the EVEMon guys decide not to earn a penny on EVEMon, they will just have to send a request for the free license.

If the products are not free, the income these people make is currently ILLEGAL. What CCP is doing now is legalising it by selling a license, so you can advertise you app, create subscriptions/post it in an appstore and earn real money.

If any company did that it would be great. Guys who like to make things for free would be free to do so and anyone who wants to get paid for his work will have to buy the license. Any company similiar to CCP that does exactly that is fine with me.

I really like your blog and I doubt I am as intelligent as you are, so I really hate to point out, that you did not present any argument for the intelligent discussion you so desire.

Please please please Tobold, tell me what is illogical and unintelligent in being in favor of a solution allowing free-workers to work for free and earners to legally earn money?

I still think the quote from the EVE-O forums somebody posted on the other thread is more relevant here: "You are charging the people who work for free to make your game better you asshat!"

Dear Tobold,

If these people work for free, they are not charged. Non-commercial products have a free license. If the EVEMon guys decide not to earn a penny on EVEMon, they will just have to send a request for the free license.

If the products are not free, the income these people make is currently ILLEGAL. What CCP is doing now is legalising it by selling a license, so you can advertise you app, create subscriptions/post it in an appstore and earn real money.

If any company did that it would be great. Guys who like to make things for free would be free to do so and anyone who wants to get paid for his work will have to buy the license. Any company similiar to CCP that does exactly that is fine with me.

I really like your blog and I doubt I am as intelligent as you are, so I really hate to point out, that you did not present any argument for the intelligent discussion you so desire.

Please please please Tobold, tell me what is illogical and unintelligent in being in favor of a solution allowing free-workers to work for free and earners to legally earn money?

The iOS Developer Program is US$99 /year( As an aside, at the last developer conference, Apple said they have paid 2.5 billion $ to developers)

The Mac Developer Program (mac apps via mac store) costs the same.

CCP costs the same.

Other platforms have similar fees.

Note also you have to limit sites in order to prevent end runs. E.g., pay $25 to join the Something Awesome forums and get a "free" app and in-game gold can't be allowed as a sham for pay $25 and get free...

I think the difference being missed is between

1) a screenshot I want to include in a post (fair use, irrelevant to this.)

2) A site/program that uses copywrited material: configure your grear/toon seeing actual copywrited images.-------------CCP has facilities in Stone Mountain Georgia, Newcastle, Shanghai so I am sure you can be sued outside of Iceland.-------

Also note that CCP could, and lawyers would say should, be far more restrictive with trademarks. In particular, allowing products, applications and web sites that have EVE in the name is weakening their trademark. In the same way you are not allowed to name your product Excel Macro Solver, you are not legally entitled to name your product EVE Skill Trainer.

Have you ever considered that CCP might be doing this to create a "register" of sorts about all the sites that function commercially about EVE?

Most of the sites that make substantial money from the game (and all MMOs from that matter) are sites that offer in-game services and virtual currency.

That means that now they either come fowrard as isk-selling sites (probably making them easier to monitor and track the currency flows) or not buy the commercial license and risk proper legal actions (assuming selling virtual currency isn't already considered a crime).

"But for every law there is a significant number of people who keep to the letter of the law JUST BECAUSE THE LAW IS THERE, without the law having to be enforced."

Which law? Trademark law? Eve in plain text is not a trademark.

Copyright law? . The fair use provisions are still part of law no matter how much certain companies would like to pretend otherwise.

I dsre say they can update the licence for the game which then creates a conudrum where you could either play the game or write about the game.

A $99 Licence simply follows in the well worn steps of others where you declare something illegal and set the price at 1/1000 of what it would cost to fight in court in the hope nobody ever will, with the bonus that once someone actually agrees to the $99 Licence their future actions are a lot more bound.

This issue in the USA is confusion between your product and an existing trademark. A shovel called the Eve shovel would seem clearly safe. A space game called Eve Offline would clearly violate. Perhaps software called Eve Skill Trainer would not violate if it helped train your feminine or apple skills but would violate if it involved items from EVE Online(tm).

On a practical note, say you receive a letter from a CCP lawyer. And say your lawyer told you that after an expensive jury trial to determine the question of fact as to whether it was confusing, you would "probably" win. How many web site owners would risk tens of thousands of legal fees on the outcome?

Could you clarify what those last things mean? I thought Image Export meant taking screenshots and stuff, but if that's not the case, then again, who cares about this license agreement if it doesn't even the majority of developers?Static Data Export is a SQL Server dump of all the data that doesn't change from day to day. Star locations, item metadata, agent affiliations and so on.

Image Export is the corresponding database of images for every item type, including ships.

Eve Image Server contains the pilot portraits for every character in the game.

The most common use for these is the killboard: An external database that contains the victories and losses of your corporation or alliance. Pretty much every corporation or alliance that does PvP has one. Even some individual PvPers have their own. To show where the kill occurred, they need the star system data. To show what was destroyed, they need the ship and item metadata together with the accompanying icons. To show who participated in the kill, they need the pilot portraits from the image server.

On a practical note, say you receive a letter from a CCP lawyer. And say your lawyer told you that after an expensive jury trial to determine the question of fact as to whether it was confusing, you would "probably" win. How many web site owners would risk tens of thousands of legal fees on the outcome?

If it was in Iceland I would completely ignore it, If it was in the states the worst consequence of ignoring it would be possible loss of the domain.

Note i am not a resident of either of those countries.

But while I 100% agree it would be very expensive to determine that matter. The consequence of a loss would certainly effect CCP more then me. They would be charging $99 for a licence to a right that it has been proven you don't need.

That is why they are charging such a cheap amount, they want people paying not fighting in court. Besides once people have agreed that CCP have a basis for that right they can allways change it to %999 a few years down the track.

I still think the quote from the EVE-O forums somebody posted on the other thread is more relevant here: "You are charging the people who work for free to make your game better you asshat!"

Only CCP said clearly, that non-commercial services will require a free license. So the above quote is untrue.

Every company should allow this kind of freedom. And the only people affected with this will be A)the players, because they will have to pay for 3rd party apps and B) all the guys with a 'buy me a coffee' button, 'cause they wither remove it, keep it illegally or start losing money on it.

I ask again - Tobold, tell me please, what is unintelligent or illogical in being in favor of a plan that would allow ones that work for free to continue to do so under the free license and allow the ones who earn some bucks illegally to legalise their income and sell their related products? Cause I really don't get the problem here.

They aren't. They got caught in Bloggers spam filter, over which I have zero control. Posts removed by me are marked as "This comment has been removed by a blog administrator".

what is unintelligent or illogical in being in favor of a plan that would allow ones that work for free to continue to do so under the free license and allow the ones who earn some bucks illegally to legalise their income and sell their related products?

The unintelligent part is the fixed $99 sum. Thus somebody making $10 a year is forced to pay nearly ten times his revenue as license fee. Somebody making $10,000 a year is paying less than 1% of his revenue. In short: If you are a big commercial site, this doesn't really hurt you. If you are a small site with a donation button or Google Ads, you are screwed.

Ok, but if you earn so little on a yearly basis, it's as simple as removing the ads/donate buttons from your site and operate under the free license. What is the use of keeping the ad/button if you earn less then $8 a month?

And also - if there's a fansite that would fall into the category you describe (commercial and unoriginal enough to pay the $99 fee) that website is as illegal now as it will be after this change. The policy not to use the company's IP is unchanged, it's only the policy to use it for $99 that is new. What I am saying is that the change will not affect the little sites you speak of so much. If the site dev cared for the law so much, there would be no site in the first place. You say that if all companies implement this thing little websites are screwed. In my opinion these little sites will be as screwed as they are right now, because what they do is as illegal now as it would be if all the companies followed CCP's lead o this.